EBOOK
Selling the Serengeti
The Cultural Politics of Safari Tourism
Benjamin GardnerSeries: Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation(0)
About
Situating safari tourism within the discourses and practices of development, Selling the Serengeti examines the relationship between the Maasai people of northern Tanzania and the extraordinary influence of foreign-owned ecotourism and big-game hunting companies. It contrasts two major approaches to community conservation-international NGO and state-sponsored conservation efforts on the one hand and the neoliberal private investment in tourism on the other-and investigates their profound effect on the Maasai's culture and livelihood. It further explores how these changing social and economic forces remake the terms through which state institutions and local people engage with foreign investors, communities, and their own territories. And finally it highlights how the new tourism arrangements change the shape and meaning of the nation-state and the village and in the process remake cultural belonging and citizenship.
Benjamin Gardner's experiences in Tanzania began during a study-abroad trip in 1991. His stay led to a relationship with the nation and the Maasai people in Loliondo lasting almost twenty years; it also marked the beginning of his analysis of and ethnographic research into social movements, market-led conservation, and neoliberal development around the Serengeti.
Benjamin Gardner's experiences in Tanzania began during a study-abroad trip in 1991. His stay led to a relationship with the nation and the Maasai people in Loliondo lasting almost twenty years; it also marked the beginning of his analysis of and ethnographic research into social movements, market-led conservation, and neoliberal development around the Serengeti.
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Reviews
"Based on more than two decades of ethnographic research, [Selling the Serengeti] is a rich chronicling and sophisticated analysis of on-going everyday and historic struggles over identity, culture, and resources in a neoliberal age...The specific points of Loliondo are intriguing and important for understanding how neoliberal conservation processes are unfolding in other parts of Tanzanian Maasai
Mara J. Goldman, African Studies Review
"Based on more than two decades of engagement with the Maasai, this study is a landmark in a new kind of 'living geography' in which people play the starring role. Conservation efforts that consist primarily of enclosure and dispossession have led the Maasai to become the unlikely cheerleaders for neoliberalism and the hostile detractors of even the best-intentioned efforts of the Tanzanian state
Paul Farmer, Koloktrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine
"For its genre, the book is big and, in a way, Parsons writes like a musician who is a multi-instrumentalist. He stretches the lyrical essay all the way to poetry, although he is also a realistic writer of considerable skill. The diagrams amplify the sense that the work is truly hybrid."
K. M. Woosnam, Choice